To adapt a movie from a novel involves a process of subtraction and consolidation. To make one from a video game is all about expansion -- or else the result is something almost unwatchable, like last year's "Tomb Raider."

"Resident Evil" is the first movie based on a video game that seems inspired by more than a desire to sell tickets to a pre-existing market. The film works within the rules of the game, taking place mainly in a single setting and piling on a relentless barrage of action sequences. But there's a psychological undercurrent. The movie occupies a zone where science fiction and nightmares collide and intertwine.

Milla Jovovich plays a young lady who wakes up one morning on the floor of her shower remembering nothing about her life to that moment. The house is quiet, but the air is electric with menace. Next thing, hooded commandos are crashing through her windows -- including the always spunky Michelle Rodriguez.

They take her on their mission to an underground city, called "The Hive," to deactivate an all-powerful computer that has just gone homicidal and killed all its employees.

That's the premise. The group has to get in and get out. Along the way, the computer throws everything it can at them, including a laser weapon that both slices people and cauterizes wounds, thus eliminating the mess from massacres. There are killer zombies and a generic all-powerful devouring fiend.

What keeps it from getting ridiculous is the sense that this is all, in some way, analogous to the process the heroine is undergoing throughout the movie: She is recovering her memory. The action in "Resident Evil" is like watching demons from the repressed unconscious break loose and attack the ego. The movie also makes a further point, that the science nightmare of the future is a manifestation of that unconscious impulse for self-destruction, loose and invisible throughout the world.

Documentary. Directed by Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Alberto Vendemmiati. (Not rated. 109 minutes. In English and in Italian with English subtitles. At the Roxie.)

Amother brushing flies from her starving child's face. Kids with missing arms or legs. Mutilated corpses. No one who sees "Jung: In the Land of the Mujaheddin" will be able to forget it, and few who see it will be sorry. Sometimes being humane means not being squeamish.

This is an Italian documentary about an old journalist, an Italian surgeon and an English nurse who travel to Afghanistan to set up a medical facility. In the process the film -- completed a year before the Sept. 11 attacks -- documents the sufferings of a people plagued by 20 years of land mines, poverty and unending war.

After seeing this, no one should be surprised at the enthusiasm with which the Afghan people greeted the recent collapse of the Taliban. "Jung" records horror stories of men and women being beaten by the Taliban and of precious goods being confiscated. The poverty and despair are heartbreaking. One young woman, letting her hair down in Northern Alliance territory, says that she covers herself only out of fear of the Taliban but that in any other country she'd never wear a burqa. "What would I do with a tent over my head?" she says.

The film's hero is Dr. Gino Strada, who always looks as though he's just rolled out of bed. This gruff, no-nonsense man turns out to be, in practice, a kind of saint, working around the clock and against the odds to bring health care into a hopeless situation. Being a saint is not an ethereal calling but a hands-on job. In one scene, Strada operates on a man who has shrapnel in his eye. In another, Strada is forced to amputate a young man's foot using a primitive saw.

On several occasions, the camera is turned on Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated two days before the World Trade Center bombings. In a country with some wild-eyed leaders, Massoud comes across as compassionate and rational.

A couple of months ago the narrative film "Kandahar" played here and was praised to the skies, but after seeing "Jung," "Kandahar" seems like a fairy tale. Those who can take it will find "Jung" the real deal.

"The Most Fertile Man in Ireland" starts with the premise that the Irish have trouble procreating. Then things really get ridiculous, and not in a funny way.

Despite its wannabe-John Waters Day-Glo colors and odd camera angles, the movie never achieves camp. Attempted farce mixes with raunch, politics and religion, missing the mark on every front.

More steady of aim is Belfast lad Eamonn (Kris Marshall), whose little guys can break through any latex fortress. He decides to earn some cash as a Johnny Appleseed for childless couples, making his deliveries the old-fashioned way.

If you follow this movie's logic, he's bedding married women because the Catholic and Protestant churches forbid artificial insemination. Adultery, apparently, isn't as frowned upon, because Eamonn's priest gives him the thumb's up.

This stuff might have been funny if "The Most Fertile Man" were an effective farce, but the movie rarely elicits a grin. When Eamonn's sterile friend threatens him with a gun and then says, "They're just blanks, anyway," that's as good as it gets.

Marshall often bugs his eyes as if he were about to burst. Though his mannerisms are distracting, every show of enthusiasm is welcome in this listless venture.

The movie collapses when it makes fun of "The Troubles" of Northern Ireland,

alternating photos of Queen Elizabeth and the pope to signal Eamonn's visits to Protestant and Catholic homes. To wrest comedy from a tragic situation, the humor has to be extremely sharp or extremely dark. Here the jokes aren't pointed enough to even offend anybody.